NOBODY 2

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

When Nobody was released in 2021, it worked perhaps better than it deserved: released in May, it was the first movie I saw in the theater since covid stay-home orders had begun 14 months before. There was something freeing about the experience, both the return to normalcy for us movie lovers, and the violent release of pent-up tension that unfolded in the plot, about a guy with a problem resisting an urge to pick fights—but always with good (sort of) on his side. It also established Bob Odenkirk as the latest in a line of unlikely older-man action heroes.

Odenkirk was 58 when Nobody was released, which makes him 61 now. That film also featured Connie Nielsen as his wife, Becca; Christopher Lloyd as his dad, David; and RZA as Harry, his brother—all of whom return for Nobody 2. Even Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath return as Hutch and Becca’s children, who are quickly established at the beginning of the film as increasingly frustrated by their dad’s absence—but not as much as Becca.

Nodody was hokey and contrived as hell, but lots of fun not just in spite of but because of that: it was a movie that made no bones about what it was, and that’s what made it work. It was kind of a blast. Nobody 2 has a bit of a problem in that it simply attempts to replicate what the first movie did, giving it the feel of a copy of a copy. Nothing is innovated here, and the film seems to serve little purpose other than to stage ultra-violent combat sequences at a rickety amusement park.

Hitch and Harry were taken there once as kids by their dad, you see, and it was the one family vacation they ever took—something Hutch is attempting to replicate by returning there with his own wife and kids. Naturally, what else is replicated is how the dad gets sucked back into old habits there, particularly when an asshole employee swats his daughter upside the back of the head. This results in violent retribution that is so wildly out of proportion, the movie quickly stopped being fun for me. Acting in self-defense is one thing, even when it’s excessive, but in response to a swat on the head? Bashing a guy’s head through an arcade game?

Nobody 2 attempts to make this behavior okay—for the sake of the audience, anyway; Becca doesn’t approve, at least not at first—by having Hutch admit to Wyatt (John Ortiz), the park owner, that “I lost my shit,” but in response to what still qualifies as assault against his daughter: “What would you do?” Wyatt, the park owner who starts off as a potential adversary after his son and Hutch’s son get into a scuffle (this is what starts it all), seems to ponder this briefly and then basically give Hutch a pass.

But there are some truly wild characters we have yet to meet. There’s the local sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks, at 47 looking shockingly like his father in middle-age), ridiculously corrupt and acting as a sort of middle-man between Wyatt, who oversees an underground drug operation for which the amusement park is a front (seems unduly complicated), and the most bonkers character of all, Lendina, played with unselfconscious relish by Sharon Stone. She’s the boss of this entire operation, a ruthless woman about whom a character might say “She’s wiped out entire bloodlines for less.” Funny how Hutch can wipe out her henchmen like they are, you know, nothing but story props.

I won’t lie, I had kind of a good time with Nobody 2. That can happen when you just surrender to what a movie is, in this case a moderately amusing action movie with modest ambitions and zero pretense. That doesn’t make this movie good, and this is just a rehash of a previous film that barely succeeded on such flimsy merits. Nobody might still hold up, actually—but it was the kind of movie that worked precisely because it shouldn’t, but it was saved by great fight choreography and charismatic performers. The performers are mostly the same in Nobody 2, but the premise and especially the villains are so ridiculous that it sometimes took me out of the movie. Every supporting character in Nobody 2 is not only a caricature, but practically a cartoon.

But, if you just want to see a bunch of people get dismembered and blown up in an amusement park, I suppose you’ll have a great time.

Fire in the hole! In the plot hole!

Overall: C+

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has clearly aged past its prime. It feels a little like the “cinematic universe” equivalent of a middle-aged guy prone to reminiscing about his glory days as a high school football star.

To be fair, I never fully locked into the “MCU” project the way millions of fans did. I am a fan of movies, not of genre, which means I can appreciate the special ones that break the mold (Black Panther, Logan, even Thor: Ragnarok) but can easily forget about the rest—and there is a lot of the rest. This new Fantastic Four movie isn’t seriously bad, even if it is still definitively dumb; it’s merely average at best, which makes it slip right into that same steady stream of superhero mediocrity.

I can’t help but compare this film to Superman, the DC competitor also currently in theaters, and although I have ultimately decided The Fantastic Four: First Steps is better, the difference is negligible. The thing is, there were things I hated more about Superman (it’s mind-numbingly stupid script) but there were also things liked a lot more about Superman (its far better casting; Krypto the Superdog, overused as he was). Its worse qualities tip the scale, which is perhaps ironic because at least Superman kept me awake. I nodded off multiple times during The Fantastic Four.

Some of my issues with this movie, admittedly, are fully justifiable inclusions in a movie based on a superhero comic book—I’m just not into these things, this idea that the heroes are for all intents and purposes gods, and therefore any presentation of stakes is fully an illusion. This is the case whether it’s in a comic book or a movie, and is perhaps a big reason I never got into comic books. I never get invested in the heroes’ success because their success is guaranteed—particularly in the first in an expected line of sequels.

I am also aware that The Fantastic Four is a bit notorious as a franchise, in that this film is the fourth—nice coincidence there—attempt at cinematic adaptation, at least if you count the 1994 production that never got released theatrically but can now be found online. A second attempt that did get theatrical release, and even did well at the box office (to the tune of $333 million worldwide), came out in 2005, with a nearly-as successful sequel in 2007. The second reboot, starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell, tanked both critically (27 out of 100 on MetaCritic) and commercially ($56 million domestic). I never saw any one of these movies because I couldn’t be bothered to care, but I certainly know that none of them were regarded as a particularly good adaptation.

All that is to say: there was a lot riding on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, both with fans of this particular group of superheroes and with the future of Marvel Studios broadly. This is film is performing relatively well, although that success is mitigated by a $200 million budget—and this, frankly, is one of my problems with the movie. Why am I not actually seeing that money put to use, or at least put to use well, onscreen? James Cameron spent $400 million to make Avatar: The Way of Water, but that was money well spent, with visual effects so astonishing they largely made up for a frustratingly simpleminded script. The problem with movies like both Superman 2025 and The Fantastic Four: First Steps is that they have both the money and the means, and it still feels like everyone is phoning it in.

This is nitpicky, but I don’t care: the Fantastic Four have a car that flies. There is a scene in this movie where a couple of them rush in this car to the scene of some mayhem, and the car quickly stops in the air in time to skid on the ground a couple of feet, and the occupants pop right out and just keep walking like the badasses they think they are. There’s no fumbling, no recalibrating their balance, no visual acknowledgement of the physics of sudden changes in velocity—in short, it looks unnatural, because it is: bodies would never move this way, except in the results of rushed VFX. And it’s distracting when, even in a fantastical world like this, something looks straight up fake when it is clearly not meant to. There are so many things that look like this in effects-heavy movies these days, and within ten years people will rewatch this stuff and feel the same effects as we do today when watching stop-motion effects in 1930s films. Except in this case, it’s not because of any limitation of technology—it’s because people can’t be bothered to take the time to get it right.

Granted, The Fantastic Four: First Steps would not be much improved even if the effects were perfected. I found Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer to be the most compelling character—also referred to as “the herald of Galactus,” she scouts planets for the godlike Galactus (Ralph Ineson) to consume, in exchange for him sparing her home planet. Garner does a lot with a part that is limited both in screen time and in physicality: the Silver Surfer sports a body encased in silver, making her look rather like the villain from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (this may be a reference lost on you if you are younger than 30). The entire plot surrounds the Fantastic Four’s efforts to stop Galactus, and get the Silver Surfer out of their way of doing so, but in broad execution it’s all packed with so many lapses in logic that I lost count.

There’s also a subplot involving “Mole Man,” as played by Paul Walter Hauser, a talented actor who is wasted in this bit part about a rival to the Fantastic Four who ultimately comes to their aid by allowing all of New York City to evacuate—not to some area outside the city, that would make too much sense, but to his underground city of “Subterranea.” This happens after all but one of the “bridges” to another dimension around the world are destroyed, which is why Galactus must be lured to the only one still standing, conveniently for this plot, right in Times Square. And this is the only reason “Subterranea” factors into the plot at all.

As for the Fantastic Four themselves, and the actors who play them, this is a bit of a mixed bag. The overexposure of Pedro Pascal continues, as he is cast as Reed Richards, “Mister Fantastic,” clearly coded as the “head of the family,” and meant to be some wild genius, as he writes equations on chalkboards that I am sure look like gibberish to any actual genius. Also, for a genius, he sure spends a lot of the movie befuddled about what to do. I can’t say he has the greatest chemistry with Vanessa Kirby, who shines as rival to Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies, but here adopts an American accent for Sue Storm, the “Invisible Woman,” a part that basically exists so she can give birth in space, to a baby with as-yet-unknown superpowers (but Galactus sure wants him!). Joseph Quinn has arguably the most charisma out of the bunch, as Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm, “The Human Torch.” And Ebon Moss-Bachrach all but disappears as a personality inside the CGI suit of Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm, “The Thing.”

Much is made of Reed’s genius invention of teleportation, which he demonstrates successfully with an egg and then explains doing the same with Planet Earth should be just as easy because the difference is just “a matter of scale.” The problem is, even though it’s immediately made clear that this cast of characters exist in a different universe than ours, Reed’s teleportation scheme never explains exactly where he’ll teleport Earth to, and spoiler alert, Earth never gets teleported at all by the end of this movie. And let’s not even get started on this movie’s countless inconsistencies of scale. Except, perhaps, for this question: if Galactus is meant to consume an entire planet, why is he the size of a skyscraper?

Much like Krypto from Superman, I did enjoy H.E.R.B.I.E. (“Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics”), Reed’s lovable robot assistant. And unlike Krypto, H.E.R.B.I.E. is not overused. Indeed, one of the better things about The Fantastic Four: First Steps is its successful sidestepping of self-indulgence: mercifully, this film doesn’t even clock in at a full two hours (its runtime is 114 minutes). Just because it’s not overstuffed doesn’t mean it’s not still a bit of a mess—a judgement I make fully aware that it’s largely informed by how tired I am of superhero-movie tropes. There have just been so many of these superhero moves over so many decades now, I truly long to see ones that stand apart with narrative innovation. Pinning any hopes for such a thing with this movie would be a mistake.

I don’t know, maybe try stepping in a different direction.

Overall: B-

SUPERMAN

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Special Effects: C+

About three quarters of the way through James Gunn’s Superman, I could no longer think of anything but this: Oh my god, this movie is dumb. But I am trying to lead with positivity!

There’s a few things I enjoyed about Superman, the seventh live action film with Superman as the top-billed character since 1978 (and I’m not even counting Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—because Batman got top billing). David Corenswet is well cast as the title character this time out, and when Gunn actually slows down long enough for us to get real character moments, the man is brimming with charisma and screen presence. He also has chemistry with Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), who works well as the scrappy reporter from the Daily Planet, because even in Gunn’s universe people apparently still care about journalism.

This many movies in—indeed, this many reboots in (I suppose this would make the third?)—it’s commendable that the story here doesn’t bother with Superman’s origin story. A series of opening titles inform us of the state of the world we are entering into, which includes “metahumans”—other people with superpowers, though Superman is the most powerful among them. I wasn’t crazy about yet another superhero movie with a supporting cast of second-tier superheroes, especially given that we never get any real chance to know “Mister Terrific” (Edi Gathegi), Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), or Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) as characters. I understand these are all actual characters from DC Comics, but do we need to overstuff a 129-minute feature film with them? But! I did kind of love that, in this Superman movie, Lois Lane has full knowledge that Clark Kent is Superman, they are actively dating, and they even have some minor relationship problems. That is a refreshing change from how we usually see their relationship in these movies.

On the short list of things I actually liked about this movie, I have saved the best for last: Superman’s superdog, Krypto, gets extensive screen time. In fact, we meet him in the opening sequence, right after the title cards have informed us that Superman has just lost a battle for the first time. We already saw this in the very well-cut teaser trailer, in which Krypto drags Superman through the Antarctic snow back to his Fortress of Solitude. And I will say this to the dog lovers out there: if you love dogs, you are going to love Krypto.

Now, it should also be noted that Krypto is mostly an obvious CGI dog, something that is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. CGI doesn’t have to be obvious and it never has—Jurassic Park taught us that 32 years ago. You have the tools and you clearly have the budget. Maybe do it right? On the other hand, obvious or not, Krypto is adorable as hell, and possibly the best thing in Superman, which is otherwise far too busy and overstuffed, stupidly convoluted, and exhaustingly ridiculous, even by regular Superman standards.

Here’s where the casting wasn’t as inspired as I thought it was: Nicholas Hoult clearly wants to be an iconic villain as Lex Luthor, but, much like this film overall, he takes a giant swing—and then misses by a wide margin. This is hardly entirely Hoult’s fault, as he’s largely shackled by how bonkers-stupid James Gunn’s script is. Lex Luthor is supposed to be a mad genius, fine. But apparently this movie has to up the ante on that idea to such a degree that Luthor has managed to invent a means for traveling in and out of a “pocket universe” of his own creation. What? If I never hear that phrase again it'll be too soon. This level of idiocy leaves me feeling deeply wistful for the days of Gene Hackman, whose Lex Luthor had a delicious understanding of sarcasm and wit. Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor only understands cartoonish obsession.

I hate to give a piece of shit like Kevin Spacey any credit, but he was the only other Lex Luthor to come close to the spirit of Gene Hackman, when he appeared as the character in Superman Returns in 2006. That film remains the only halfway decent Superman movie since the first two Christopher Reeve films, and that one was released 19 years ago. In my review of that film, I wrote about the awkward challenge of marrying Superman’s old-school wholesome sensibility with the cynical sensibility of the 21st Century. In this new Superman, Gunn tries hard to update these characters for the current era, but sometimes it just doesn’t work. This film is rated PG-13, probably exclusively because of how frequently characters are swearing, but in a DC universe dominated by Superman, they just come across like people swearing to sound cool, which of course falls flat.

I wish I could say that at least this Superman is better than Zack Snyder’s 2016 film Man of Steel, but alas, it is not. These films just have different reasons for being cinematic beacons of big-budget mediocrity. James Gunn makes an attempt at infusing his film with some gravitas, even going so far as designing the credits in the style of those from the Richard Donner films. All this does is remind us how much better those films are—they are now very dated, to be sure, but they still manage to capture a sense of wonder that modern superhero films, and certainly those based on DC comics, lack. The Superman we get in 2025 falls victim to the same claptrap nine out of ten other superhero movies do, sagging under the weight of their own bloat, and throwing in stakes so ridiculous as to become meaningless. Other movies feature sequences wherein the villains threaten the existence of either the entire city or the entire universe—here, we get a “dimensional tear” that threatens both at once! And Lex Luthror is such an evil genius he can stop or start it with a bank of computers!

Why do filmmakers think they can improve overplayed iconic character stories by making them pointlessly convoluted with what amounts to magical nonsense? I’d love to see a new Superman that is simple but clever, inspired but straightforward. Or, I could just go watch the Richard Donner films again. The tagline for the 1978 film, which ushered in the superhero blockbuster era, was You’ll believe a man can fly. Nearly five decades later, we’ve seen so many men fly that our eyes have glazed over. The tagline for this new film might as well have been You won’t believe a man can revive a franchise.

One of the few memorable quotes in this Superman is when a guy on the news says, “The one thing liberals and conservatives can agree on is that Lex Luthor sucks.” I wish I could say that we can all agree that this Superman sucks, but conservatives are already priming liberals to defend it. And to be fair, “sucks” is a bit strong of a word. I suppose I could try to be like the cool kids these days and just say that James Gunn’s Superman is “mid.” It’s only David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, and Krypto that even raise it to that level.

If there is any reason to see Superman it’s Krypto the superdog. And I still don’t particularly recommend it.

Overall: C+

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

Talk about a diluted franchise. Steven Spielberg’s original, 1993 film, Jurassic Park, is easily one of the greatest blockbuster movies ever made, and people have now tried six more times to recapture its magic, with varying degrees of never fully succeeding. In terms of box office, the reboot Jurassic World (2015) came the closest. Ironically, even though it felt like a significant comedown, Jurassic Park’s first sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park came closest in quality. It was the only other one also directed by Spielberg, at least—and is really the only other one that still had the same sense of wonder, alongside the monster menace.

Reporters love to note that Jurassic World made the most money out of any film in this franchise, but what they constantly ignore is that figure being in unadjusted dollars. Adjusted for inflation, Jurassic Park remains the biggest grossing film in the franchise by a fair margin—by that metric, it remains the 18th-most successful movie ever made in the U.S. Jurassic World ranks 30th, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park ranks 113th, much further down the list but notably higher than any of the other sequels.

No one even thinks about Jurassic Park III (2001) anymore. Even though Jurassic World was itself a massive success, rebooting the franchise 14 years after the end of the original trilogy, it could also be said that no one thinks about its two sequels anymore either: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which was flawed but still pretty fun upon rewatch; and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which held exciting promise by combining that trilogy’s cast with the cast of the original film, only to turn out to be hot garbage, easily the worst movie of either trilogy.

Should Hollywood leave well enough alone, then? Of course not! All of three years later, let’s . . . do another reboot! Functionally that’s sort of what Jurassic World: Rebirth is, although it has too much in common with its immediate predecessors to feel too separate from them, even with an entirely new cast. And let’s be honest, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey are all far more compelling than Bryce Dallas Howard, and arguably at this point, even Chris Pratt.

Here’s the downside of these otherwise incredibly charismatic actors in Rebirth: I could not possibly give less of a shit about their characters. Scenes offering us backstory near the beginning of the film are so dull, I thought about how I’d rather be napping. This film takes some time to get to any real dinosaur action—one of several allusions to the original Jurassic Park (something even Jurassic World did, making this a bit like a copy of a copy)—but what made Jurassic Park work so incredibly well even in scenes with no action was its clever humor, vibrant performances, and genuinely compelling characters. At the end of Rebirth, when one of the principal characters turns up alive when everyone else was terrified they were dead, I found myself thinking: I’d have way more respect for this movie if the six-limbed mutant “Distorus Rex” suddenly appeared and ate that person after all.

So yes, this time around, a large number of the dinosaurs are cross-bred mutants. We meet the Distorus Rex in the opening sequence, a flashback from “17 years ago” introducing us to the second-ugliest creature ever to appear in this franchise. (The ugliest, and also the stupidest looking, would still be the feathered Pyroraptor from Dominion.) They even talk about how these genetically mutated creatures were not something any park goers wanted to see. So why do they think movie goers want to see them? Distorus Rex doesn’t even look like a real dinosaur. It looks like the xenomorph from Alien crossed with the Elephant Man.

It really kind of sounds like I hated this movie, doesn’t it? Nope! I just . . . didn’t love it. Distorus Rex aside, Rebirth still has a whole bunch of other creatures that are very cool, in sequences that are very exciting. Granted, no part of any of them is original: much of Rebirth just feels like a cross between the original Jurassic Park, Jaws (particularly the boat sequences, complete with characters shooting nonlethal devices at the sea creatures), and King Kong (specifically the sequence where they visit an island that turns out to be still inhabited with dinosaurs). Those are all great movies, at least, and when Rebirth pays homage to them, it generally does them well. Which is to say: when it’s focused on the characters, this movie is dull as hell. But when the dinosaurs start eating people, it cooks.

It was easy to feel optimistic, having the likes of Gareth Edwards as director, and David Koepp—who wrote the scripts or both Jurassic Park and The Lost World—as the writer. It may be relevant to note that Koepp is 62 now, and not exactly brimming with the original ideas he once had. (Or maybe he just needs to work with the right director: his script for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, also released this year, was excellent.) This time out, he shoehorns a completely unrelated family into the plot: a divorced dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is sailing across the Atlantic with his two daughters (played by Luna Blaise and Adrian Miranda) and the older daughter’s boyfriend (David Iacono), and they inevitably get their boat capsized by a giant sea creature. Johansson & crew hear the distress call in their own boat, go to rescue them, and that’s the only reason why the Delgado Family winds up tagging along on a misguided and harrowing adventure.

What exactly are they doing then, you ask? Just kidding, you didn’t ask. Nobody cares! Except it’s so dumb, I’m going to tell you anyway: they need blood samples from live specimens of the largest dinosaurs of those now thriving only in the equatorial region, so they can use it to cure heart disease. Because they have such huge hearts, you see! Whatever, move along, next we have another thrilling action set piece.

None of these movies have ever been plausible, not even the original Jurassic Park—although that one at the very least had adjacency to plausibility, a clever conceit that could sound real enough to the uneducated. They’ve just gotten dumber as they went along, but they all work when characters are getting chased and sometimes eaten by menacing dinosaurs. (This was the fatal flaw in 2022’s Dominion: nobody cares about giant mutant locusts. We want dinosaurs!)

It could be argued that the action setpieces are more satisfying throughout the film in Rebirth than any of these movies at least since Jurassic World. Gareth Edwards knows how to shoot this kind of stuff with a sense of scale, if not always wonder—that’s kind of his thing. It’s the wonder, really, that’s missing here. But at least it has heart stopping thrills, and that’s all anyone is going to these movies for.

Mutadon? More like MutaDUMB!

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B
Special Effects: A-

If you’re a Gen-Xer feeling nostalgic for movies featuring Tom Cruise in his underwear, then boy, is this your lucky weekend! He spends a lot of time in his underwear in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. I can only assume he’s eager for us all to see how fit he still is at the age of 62. With a net worth of nearly $900 million, this guy can surely afford all the necessary personal trainers and nutritionists he might need, and still I shudder to think of the time and effort that must go into maintaining a body like that. Plus, he needs that body for all the stunt work he famously does himself. I’m 49 and I can barely get up from a sitting position without groaning in pain.

Still, I’m a little stuck on the screentime Cruise spends in nothing but tight boxer briefs in this movie. At first, Ethan Hunt is running on a treadmill to prepare for a deep sea dive. Of course one of many expendable villains attacks him, and we get a fight scene entirely choreographed with Cruise in his boxer briefs. It’s like the Mission: Impossible version of the fight scene in Eastern Promises, except Cruise doesn't have the courage to go totally naked. Don’t be such a coward, Tom! You’re known for movie stunts, after all—why not truly shock everyone by going full frontal? Maybe his scrotum is the only part of his body with enough wrinkles to make him actually look his age.

A few scenes later, Ethan strips down again, this time as part of his narrow escape from a crashed submarine rolling off an ocean floor cliff. This is how we get the iconic shot of him in the fetal position, floating toward any iced-over ocean surface. Admittedly, it’s a beautiful shot, and all that bare skin effectively adds to the visual impact. This is, in fact, one of the things that impressed me most about The Final Reckoning—Fraser Taggart’s cinematography. Taggart has only four feature film credits as Cinematographer, but his last one was 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part One in 2023; now just Dead Reckoning since they changed their mind about the name of this year’s movie, its own release date delayed several times, the final delay due to the 2023 actors’ strike). There are two different signature set pieces in The Final Reckoning, and the biplane chase is clearly getting the most attention. But I was most wowed by the rolling ocean-floor submarine sequence, in which Ethan is in and out of water depending on the compartment he’s in, and water flowing from one compartment to another is what causes the submarine to tilt. This sequence has a great deal of fantastic camera work, the angle we see frequently off kilter from what is actually up or down for Ethan, giving us a visceral sense of his own spatial confusion. The missiles that also roll around or fall into the water just to complicate things is icing on the cake.

This is, after all, what we come to Mission: Impossible movies for. It wasn’t so much the case in the franchise’s early years—the first Mission: Impossible was released in 1996, and although it did have some enduringly famous set pieces of its own (the wire heist; the leap from an exploding helecopter to a train—honestly the dumbest looking stunt in the entire franchise), it spent a lot more time on spycraft and, particularly in the wire heist scene, suspense. As the films have gone on, now 29 years of them, on average they have gotten better as they went. Mission: Impossible II was the most forgettable, and then, for me at least, Dead Reckoning was the first since then to dip slightly.

And this is where I seem to break from the critical consensus—people really loved Dead Reckoning two years ago, but while I still found it very entertaining, I also found it overlong (2 hours and 43 minutes is about 40 minutes too many) and too reliant on rehashing set piece concepts from earlier movies. What’s more, the visual effects during the train crash scene were too obviously CGI, to a degree not as noticeable since the aforementioned helicopter explosion in the first film.

Thus, I find myself surprised at how the critical consensus on The Final Reckoning is less enthusiastic, and yet I found myself enjoying it more. To me, this film is closer to a return to form—utterly preposterous story, sure, but the set pieces are genuinely amazing, worth the price of admission on their own. What’s more, much like Dead Reckoning, Christopher McQuarrie (who has now directed the last four of these movies) doesn’t bother wasting any of the best action on the cold open, which here has smaller stakes than in earlier films. It still opens with a clever escape, but it’s just a taste of what’s to come, a sign of better storytelling.

Granted, The Final Reckoning is also overlong (2 hours and 49 minutes is about 45 minutes too many), evidently to allow enough space for its convoluted plotting. As in the last film, this one lacks any villain with personality, because the villain is AI, or rather “The Entity,” which is somehow breaching global nations’ nuclear arsenals one by one, with the threat of igniting a nuclear war that will annihilate humanity. We do get U.S. cabinet discussions about “strategic strikes” against eight targets worldwide, as if that has any rationale at all when it would make the planet uninhabitable. Notwithstanding the objective idiocy of the premise of these movies, it’s still nice to fantasize about Angela Bassett as the U.S. President rather than the genuine dipshit president we actually have. Bassett effortlessly commands respect, at least.

The Final Reckoning works overtime to tie all the previous films together, just as Dead Reckoning did; this time we get yet another key character returning from the first film from 1996. As always, we get unlikely heroes, and Ethan loses someone he has long cared about. Given the nature of this entire franchise, the writing is serviceable but never what we come for; what it delivers are true thrills beautifully shot (my one cinematgraphy complaint being how frequently characters stand in just the right spot for just their eyes not to be in shadow). It may be too long, but it’s never dull.

McQuarrie and Cruise do give us a somewhat curious ending this go-round, something that feels very much by design: long running characters get their own moment onscreen, as if sayiny goodbye. But the story ends with nothing preventing a return to this universe of endless stunts yet again, except maybe Tom Cruise’s age. His physical prowess is still incredible, but he can only maintain that for so much longer. Maybe the next Mission: Impossible will finally find someone to pass the baton to, even if Cruise returns in something more of a supporting role. The possibilities are endless, and there’s no reason not to think this franchise will be too.

Ethan Hunt covered from head to toe—but it doesn’t last long!

Overall: B+

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Fight or Flight is dumb as shit, and it’s also a blast. Because you know what? This is actually a movie with integrity. It knows what it is, it tells you what it is, and then delivers exactly what it promises. There are no pretenses here, and that is precisely what makes a movie like this work.

In less sensible hands, there would be an attempt to shoehorn some kind of unearned empathy for the characters, some sense of earnestness or wholesome sweetness—a dad just trying to show up for his little girl, or whatever. Nobody’s here for that shit! This is something first-time feature director James Madigan understands. Madigon previously worked for many years on visual effects, for the likes of Iorn Man 2 or Bill & Ted Face the Music. He’s also worked as Second Unit or Assistant Director, on films like Insurgent and The Meg. It would be tempting to say that he’s being forced to slum it here with his first feature directorial gig, except that clearly given the right opportunity, this guy knows how to deliver.

He’s also got the perfect star in Josh Hartnett, now starring in two films in as many years that qualify as slightly-elevated trash—the other one being Trap, the M. Night Shyamalan film that has its own dumb charms but ultimately fails to live up to its own promise. Fight or Flight is actually a better movie, never bothering with misguided plot turns and instead staying the course on its own pulpiness.

To be clear, there are definite lulls in Fight or Flight. But they are reliably brief, as this movie never wastes time getting to the delightfully ridiculous. Lucas (Hartnett) is a disgraced FBI agent being given a chance at redemption when he is the only person close enough to follow an elusive criminal onto a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco. Here’s the fun twist on the premise, something thankfully established early on so it’s never used as a predictable “reveal”—the “ghost,” as the elusive person is called, has a $10 million bounty on their head, and when their flight itinerary is leaked, we wind up with a large plane packed with assassins.

Who needs snakes? Hitmen (and hitwomen) will do just fine. In fact, there’s a line between straight up garbage and well-crafted trash. Fight or Flight works because it operates on its own terms, as opposed to pre-emotive fan service. The more ridiculous it got, the more fun I had—even when assassins found weapons that would never actually make their way on such a plane. I guess in some cases having characters search luggage in the cargo hold is a convenient trick. One particular weapon, which I won’t spoil even though the trailer does, effectively tops everything seen up to that point, ratcheting up the mayhem exponentially.

Fight or Flight frequently cuts back to predictably dubious agents on the ground, played by Kate Sackhoff and Julian Kostov, who are a bit wasted here. On the plane, British-Indian actor Charithra Chandran is a relative standout in a key role, ultimately holding her own in all of the in-flight hand-to-hand combat that would never really work in the confines of an airplane mid-flight. But who cares? No one is coming to a movie like this for plausibility. You want to see gushing bloodshed and dismemberment, which Fight or Flight has in spades. As well as many other weapons.

I giggled my way through this movie, tickled pink at its cartoon violence, the airplane setting giving it a seemingly novel spin akin to the much higher-profile 2022 film Bullet Train—but without the pointless indulgence in so-called character development. Fight or Flight has a perfectly respectable runtime of 102 minutes, because it knows we have no need to know that much about who these characters are. By the end, the script does throw in some token morality about slave labor used to manufacture our electronics, a plot concept so undercooked it’s barely noticeable. At least it’s heavily loaded with clever takes on implausible fight choreography, the only thing any of us have come here for, and which the crew is happy to serve.

The Not So Friendly Skies

Overall: B

THE ACCOUNTANT²

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

The Accountant 2 is the kind of movie that makes me glad I have a monthly AMC subscription—I’m paying the same no matter how good or bad the movie is. Of course, my husband decided to join me for this one, which meant I did pay $15.21 for his ticket. I can’t say it was especially worth it.

When I saw The Accountant in 2016, I was quite pleasantly surprised by it, especially given its evenly mixed reviews. The circumstances were preposterous and the depictions of autism by non-autistic people dubious—but still, I found the characters charming, especially Ben Affleck as Christian, the title character who is a cross between Rain Man and Rambo, and who launders money through, you guessed it, an accounting business.

There’s no actual CPA accounting in The Accounting 2. So much for truth in advertising! The closest we get is the clever superscript “2” in the title design. At least that makes more sense than 33 years ago when some genius unveiled the title design for Alien³. “Alien cubed”? I don’t remember seeing a xenomorph packing around a pocket protector. At least Affleck’s Christian is actually pretty square. Honestly that title design is the most clever thing about The Accountant 2.

How many movies do we need about human trafficking, anyway? I’m all for making the focus of this film the relationship between Christian and his brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), but is this really the context we have to put it in? An argument could be made that this film is particularly timely, what with its empathetic depictions of undocumented migrants, particularly those who get taken advantage of by actual criminals. I have no complaints about that. I just wish this movie were better.

It’s strange to me that the critical consensus on The Accountant was evenly mixed, the critical consensus on The Accountant 2 moves slightly toward mixed-positive. The first film is definitively better, and the second one brings back all but one of the first film’s principal characters, evidently just for nostalgia’s sake (J.K. Simmons as Ray King; Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Marybeth Medina; Alison Wright as the faceless voice on Christian’s phone), though some of them don’t last long. The exception is Anna Kendrick, the one principal character who does not return. Reportedly this is because of a desire to focus on the brothers’ relationship rather than have a romantic interest. I also applaud the disinclination to include romance only for its own sake.

The Accountant 2 takes way too long to get to the aforementioned relationship between the brothers, though, the first act front loaded with plot mechanics. This is at the expense of what made Christian interesting in the first place. Instead of humanizing him, we just get more of Christian’s ticks alienating people, or more pointedly, annoying his brother. It also introduces this thing called “acquired savant syndrome,” in which extraordinary skills are developed quickly after a brain injury. Enter Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), whose post-trauma skill is being one hell of an assassin.

I did find Anaïs relatively compelling, even as she proved to be a key part of convoluted story threads related to a specific family of migrants. But that’s just because I have a thing for women who kick ass, even if (and sometimes especially when) they are villainous. In the end, though, there is not enough interaction between her and the characters we care most about, and she isn’t even present in a climactic sequence involving a two-man shootout with countless men at a Juarez prison camp where they are holding kidnapped children captive. This sequence is just like those in countless other movies, and I just got bored.

I’d have liked The Accountant 2 if it had leaned more into the dynamics of Christian’s limited number of relationships. But even his budding “buddy” relationship with his brother takes a definitive backseat to both the plot and the action, which is largely rote. The same could be said of the first film, but that one had its priorities straight, helping us get to know who Christian is. The Accountant 2 doesn’t allow us to get to know him any better, and instead ultimately has him start breaking out of comfort zones in ways the first film would have us believe are highly implausible. And that movie was highly improbable to begin with. Reuniting with this character could have been a good thing if only it felt like it was building on a strong foundation, but the foundation was shaky to begin with, rendering this a sequel that’s ultimately fruitless.

Is the stiffness all our hidden guns or it it our personalities?

Overall: C+

THUNDERBOLTS*

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

Thunderbolts*, like countless other Marvel Studios films before it, is both overlong and overstuffed, trying to do too much, because even after years of being exhausted by it, these movies still expect to trade on audiences’ intricate knowledge of every other wild thing that has ever happened in now-33 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Who has time for that shit?

Furthermore, there are no aliens in this movie. I only mention this because there are aliens in other MCU movies, and this one has a very brief, single line that references “when the aliens came.” But what if you’re watching this movie and you’ve never seen any of those other, “alien” ones? You’d just be left thinking: Huh?

None of the original Avengers are in Thunderbolts* either (spoiler alert!). What happened to them all, anyway? How many years ago was that? Some sacrificed themselves, I think? Some simply retired, like, to a farm or something? I honestly don’t remember, and it’s because frankly I don’t care. I’m just over here waiting for another one of the rare MCU films that actually manages a successful pivot, like Black Panther or Logan. I even liked Black Widow more than I expected to—even if it’s not quite in the same league as the aforementioned films—which is the very reason I found myself interested in Thunderbolts*, which serves as a quasi-sequel. Florence Pugh and David Harbour both return as Yelena Belva and Alexei Shastakov (“The Red Guardian”), and they are delightful characters.

They do get a bit darker here, as the themes of this film, as directed by Jake Shreier, takes a bit of a left turn into metaphors for mental health and depression. As someone who does not live with depression, I cannot truly speak to how successful the film is at this. It’s easy to imagine some people feeling like it trivializes their experiences and their struggles. Others might find it makes them feel seen. The inevitable climactic battle here takes place inside the mind of a supervillain who is a huge danger to himself and the world, but is also deeply empathetic—an unusual choice that I appreciate. Even when it doesn’t fully work, I can always respect a big swing.

Of course, the plotting also gets unnecessarily convoluted. But, if it results in by far the biggest role in an MCU film by Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the perennially dubious CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, I’m all for it. Thunderbolts* could have taken a few action sequence cuts and added more of Valentina. Nobody would have complained.

Not that I have any major complaints about Thunderbolts* as it stands. This ragtag team of misfit criminals-turned-heroes, which along with Yelena and Alexei, includes Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and maybe also Robert Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), have chemistry. They get conveniently thrown together when Valentina sends them all to assassinate each other in a giant vault on top of a mountain where she plans to incinerate all the evidence of a shady operation which, naturally, ultimately produces our supervillain.

As for the supervillain, comic book readers will likely recall why he is referred to as both “Sentry” and “The Void.” It’s easy to feel ambivalent about this character, and it’s difficult to gauge how deliberately Schreier makes that part of the point. I will say this: after countless superhero movies following the exact same beats over and over, in which a CGI-laden mega-battle occurs to save the entire planet or the entire galaxy or hell, even the universe (how about multiverses!), it’s refreshing to see one of these movies dial back the stakes and ground them, even if in this case they are largely wrapped in uncertainly executed metaphorical psychology.

Whatever turns it takes, Thunderbolts* is consistently and undeniably fun. It’s a bit drab visually, lots of shades of grey in its color palate (perhaps a deliberate choice for characters who struggle between inner light and inner darkness), and the visual effects are serviceable. Black Widow was a better movie, and the absence of Scarlett Johansson is keenly felt, but it’s also nice to spend more time with a couple of other great characters is introduced to us. The new characters feel a bit expendable overall, really, but it’s the presence of the special ones that at least slightly tips the scales in its favor.

*Made you look!

Overall: B

SINNERS

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

Apparently I’m a White guy who just doesn’t get it. Or at least, I didn’t at first. The deeply allegorical nature of Sinners had to be spelled out to me. A friend spelled it out, in a way that made it click for me: this is an allegory about the vampiric nature of White communities, and how they appropriate other cultures, specifically Black culture.

It’s also much more nuanced than that, of course. The line that has stayed with me perhaps the most vividly is when a vampire who has been frozen in youth for decades approaches an old man, a man who is near the end of a decades-long career singing the blues, and offers him eternal life as an alternative to dying of old age. The blues singer, actually a key character from the film just much later in life, replies: “I think I’ve seen enough of this place.” Someone in the theater shouted at the screen: “No kidding!”

Most of the action in Sinners takes place over the course of a single day, the exciting stuff deep into the film, when twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) mount the opening night of a barn converted into a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. It may be a surprise to learn that I kept thinking about Jurassic Park, which follows a very similar narrative arc: the solid first half is nothing but setup, the second half nothing but thrilling payoff. Indeed, very little of consequence seems to be happening in the first half of Sinners, in which we spend a lot of time getting introduced to characters and learning back stories. Most notable among them are those of Smoke and Stack, who have returned after seven years in Chicago—which turned out not to be the bastion of Black freedom it was cracked up to be. “Might as well play with the devil you know,” they say.

One of the twins reconnects with an old flame, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom he once had a baby who died as an infant. The other pushes away his old flame, Mary (Hailee Seinfeld), in his mind for her own protection—she’s found a “rich White husband” (a character we never meet), but by 1930s standards, she exists in a liminal racial space, due to her grandfather having been half-Black.

There’s a lot of music in Sinners, and I am happy to report that the excellent soundtrack is available, either for purchase or on a music streaming service near you. It features a lot of blues, with Irish folk music sprinkled in—writer-director Ryan Coogler, here producing his first original, non-franchise feature film since his 2013 breakthrough Fruitvale Station, has real skill for using music to both uplift and unnerve. It feels a bit pointed that the primary vampire villain in this film, a local White guy named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), sings an Irish jig in the creepiest way imaginable, several Black characters who have been turned stumble-dancing in a circle around him. This isn’t so much a judgment of traditional Irish culture—which, notably, the Black characters in Sinners openly appreciate—but rather a commentary on the very existence of rich culture actually available to White people, particularly at that time, but it’s still not enough for them. They must also consume the culture surrounding them.

Many characters we meet, get to know, and come to care about in Sinners are eventually turned into monsters. This is very much the point. It also includes two Asian-American characters, a married couple who run a general store and a grocery store on opposite sides of the same street in the local town. There’s probably a lot to unpack regarding the way these characters interact with the Black community here, but I’ll just go ahead and leave that packed, as it isn’t my bag to mess with. There is also a memorable scene, when we first see Remmick, that features members of the Choctaw Nation, having chased him to the home of a White couple he manipulates into inviting them into their home.

This, again, is rather far into the runtime of Sinners, which clocks in at 137 minutes. This is a bit longer than necessary; the aforementioned formula would have been just as effective were the two halves just an hour each. Coogler also takes a couple of moments to show off the special effects, especially as it pertains to Michael B. Jordan playing twins. Around the time we see them for the first time, we see them pass a cigarette between each other’s fingers, and the CGI effects are obvious. Mind you, I’ll never complain about getting to see more of Michael B. Jordan, but would it not have been simpler just to cast a pair of actual twins?

Coogler is an undeniable talent, though, and plenty of people are clearly eager to work for him—in this case, including Delroy Lindo as pianist Delta Slim, and even legendary blues singer Buddy Guy as the aforementioned blue singer character nearing the end of his career. Sinners is overflowing with acting talent, and one wonders how much of the film’s roughly $100 budget went to paying them—the visual effects could have used a bit more of that budget.

However it got made, I have a strong feeling that Sinners would be particularly rewarding upon rewatch. Much is made of how music can conjure both darkness and light, and within the context of ancestral wisdom, from the past and into the future. A particularly great scene liberalizes this, when the performance of a blues song morphs into other genres—both that resulted in the invention of the blues, and what later would not have existed without it. Coogler’s cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, swoops and weaves the camera through the revelry in the juke joint full of people forgetting their pain for just a moment, lost in the music, nameless characters passing here and there, in the dress and playing the instruments of cultures from different times and different continents, from Africa to America and from centuries past to the Great Depression, and on to the eras of rap and hiphop. Sinners references many times, places and cultures that have come and gone in specific ways I personally have no power to put my finger on, but on a thematic level, I can at least appreciate that something profound is at work.

Brace yourselves—for something both familiar and unprecedented.

Overall: B+

NOVOCAINE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

The best thing Novocaine has going for it is its clever and innovative premise: an Assitant Manager at a bank breaks the streak of an incredibly sheltered life to go on a wildly dangerous quest to save his crush from bank robber hostages—something he’s uniquely able to do because he has a genetic condition that prevents him from feeling pain.

What this means is two things. First, for an action comedy, Novocaine gets surprisingly graphic and gory. Second, for a mid-tier movie like this, Novocaine is genuinely funny, often precisely because of the graphic gore. Some of it actually reminded me of the 2023 comic gore fest Cocaine Bear, which actually put some viewers off because it relied so heavily on violence as comedy, but I got a big kick out of it.

Novocaine spends more time getting comedy out of its character relationships, to varying effect. Jack Quaid is well cast as Nate, the man with the “Novocaine” nickname. We learn that he grew up sheltered because it’s so easy for him to get injured and not realize it—he even avoids eating solid foods for fear of biting his tongue off (and when he is finally convinced to try a bite of cherry pie, I was really afraid that was what actually would happen). Quaid embodies the put-upon recluse well, although the full body of tattoos (all drawn on my Nate himself) strains believability. Plus, he has real charisma with Amber Midthunder, who plays the object of Nate’s crush at the bank, Sherry.

The bank robbers, though, are to a person thinly drawn, utterly contrived villains who fail to be interesting despite the best efforts of the people playing them—including Jack Nicholson’s son, Ray Nicholson. Between him and Quaid, who is the son of Randy Quaid and Meg Ryan, Novocaine is quite the “nepo baby” movie. But if an actor has the juice, it doesn’t matter who their parents are. It’s easy to see potential in Nicholson, but it would be nice to see him cast as a character whose motivations actually make sense. In Novocaine, his Simon character kills people indiscriminately both during and after the bank robbery, racking up a body count with no interrogation whatsoever into what’s behind his behavior. No sane criminal who has actually had multiple successful heists already would act so recklessly, but here I guess he serves as a potentially lethal danger to a protagonist who can withstand massive injury without blinking an eye.

Speaking of which, co-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, and writer Lars Jacobson, are fairly careful about making sure Nate’s injuries actually last and don’t magically disappear. This does happen a bit with cuts and bruises on his face—Quaid is the star, after all—but the burns on his hand after sticking it in boiling oil last the rest of the film, sometimes taking other characters aback. An injury to his leg has him limping thereafter. And by the climactic sequence at the end of the film, Nate is finding ways to use his own injuries as weapons.

And this is all we’re going to Novocaine to see, really: the comic violence and clever gore that comes with a guy on a dangerous mission who can’t feel pain. That, and Jack Quaid himself. Few other actors would be as good a fit for Nate, a guy who is fearful and cautious until he is driven to put his body through the ringer. There’s a twist about halfway through that I did not see coming but which I’m sure others will see a mile away. It does make the story more interesting, but in a way that is severely limited by a pack of one-dimensional villains whose motivations only get halfway to making sense about half the time.

The trick to this movie—and most action comedies, really—is to go in with expectations properly calibrated. I certainly expected nothing special out of Novocaine, and that is precisely what I got. But it’s also very well paced and consistently funny, which is how a movie that could easily have fallen flat manages to work. Sometimes you just want solid entertainment even if it’s ultimately forgettable.

Nate never gives a handout because this just might be what he gets back.

Overall: B